General purpose computing is dying. The freedom to do whatever you want with your computer becomes more and more restricted by default operating systems on the daily that in general suck and deserve to be drop-kicked out of anyone’s life. Regain your basic peace and tranquility in your personal computing space by using Linux.
You no longer need to be a hacker to install Linux. I strongly advise you to at least try it. It’s free and open source software, and there is almost no risk in trying it yourself even just once by live-booting from a flash drive.
You don’t need to know anything about Linux or computers to do this. All the fancy Matrix green letter command line stuff you can learn later on once you actually have a need to use it, you don’t have to learn it to use Linux.
What you need:
- An empty 16gb+ flash drive
What you do:
- Download a Linux .iso file from an official source (Ubuntu is a great starter choice)
- Once it’s downloaded, use a simple program to “flash” the file onto a flash drive (like Etcher)
- Unplug the drive and plug it back in
- Search how to “boot from USB” and do it - select the drive you just flashed as the boot device
There is almost no risk: when you get the option, select “live boot”. This means you can try out all that Linux has to offer without installing it onto your device. If you don’t like it, shut down, unplug the drive, and it’ll restart back to your regular system.
Even so, back up your stuff because you might just dumb thumb the “install” option by accident.
That’s it. If you can do what you want to do on your computer on Linux, you can avoid a whole lot of modern OS ridiculousness by installing it and using it full-time. The first and very last time I thought “oh, time to log into Windows and have a great experience” was when I wiped that trash permanently off of my laptop.
Every new version of Windows has everyone who actually has a brain begging for the previous version back because it steadily has become so commercialized and bloated with apps that will spam you and remove any power you have to actually enjoy your computing life.
Linux is not difficult to use, and well worth the time invested.
